Silage is traditionally produced on individual farms from plant material that the farmer has available. The starting material can include any one or more of the conventional forage plants, such as grass, maize and legumes. Not only is the quality of such starting material variable and unpredictable, but also the conditions under which the farmer produces the silage can differ from one farm to another. The nutritional properties of the resulting silage are therefore very variable.
Silage is used principally as winter forage for animals, such as cattle, and usually needs to be supplemented by commercially available compound feedstuffs. To provide the animals with a balanced diet, the quantity and composition of the compound feedstuff needs to be chosen carefully. Before this choice can be made, the nutritional value of the silage must be known.
Techniques are already available for performing quite detailed analyses of silage, but these techniques are cumbersome and can only be performed satisfactorily in properly equipped laboratories. It is therefore standard practice for silage samples to be sent to appropriate central laboratories from which the required analytical data becomes available only after several days or perhaps weeks.